The Year of Living Carlos Dangerously

Anthony Weiner's sexting addiction nuked his political career (twice!), endangered his marriage (twice!), and turned him into a walking penis joke (forever!).

Marshall Sella tails Weiner through his doomed campaign for New York mayor, speaks candidly with The Imperfect Messenger himself, and learns there are greater lessons here than "Don't send junk shots to strangers." (Although, seriously: Don't send junk shots to strangers)

Forty-eight hours out from the New York city mayoral primary, Anthony Weiner had agreed to speak at the Bethany United Methodist Church in Brooklyn. The pastor, decked out in a perfectly white, long raiment, had really revved up the crowd. He was going through a visual presentation called "17 Principles of Success," and the sermon seemed to have lots of advice about money: about how doing things such as writing down your goals would put the power of the Lord in you, and how that power would make you a millionaire.

The Candidate arrived. I had gotten so accustomed to seeing his campaign uniform of rolled-up shirtsleeves that I blurted out, "A jacket? Who are you?"

"It’s church, brutha!" said Weiner.

The pastor was describing step four of the seventeen-step presentation. Weiner and I felt a mutual dread that this was going to go not just long, but "power of the Lord" long.

Happily, the pastor took mercy and introduced Weiner, turning to him and intoning, "I salute your resilience. I salute the tiger in you!" Weiner gave a version of his usual speech, and there was singing. Then he took his leave, and I followed.

It was a splinteringly bright afternoon. We sat on a stoop a few doors down, a ridiculous place for a private talk about sexting or even campaigning; people were walking by, recognizing him, calling out to him. (Many had strolled out of the church early; they’d never be millionaires.) No one had an unkind word. Well, unless it was accidental: One man assured Weiner he was voting for him, adding, "I’m also voting for Eliot Spitzer!" as if the two men were running together on some kind of Degeneracy ’13 ticket. Weiner visibly cringed.

I had a going theory about sexting and the whole twenty-first-century ant farm of technology that involves sex, and I wanted to float it by the Candidate. There’s a pretty bright line between the people who regard sexting as a repugnant, unnatural practice and those who regard it as absolutely no big deal. In the main, people under 40 can’t understand why it’s even frowned upon. Everybody does it all the time. It’s easy and fun and what the hell.

But politics, that fun-house reflection of how Americans are feeling, has a way of lagging far behind in such matters. In twenty years, one comedian remarked, it’ll be strange if we have a president who hasn’t sent cock shots around. That president will not be Anthony Weiner. He is going to be one of the final casualties in the moral war on sexting—a man who gained the entire world, then, through his own blindness, deceit, and prodigious sexting abilities, was brought low, rendered a punch line, and banished from the one career he was born to pursue.

Weiner mulled over my generational theory, then called it "overly simplistic," which is what people always say when they want to gain the intellectual high ground on a topic. Still: "A lot of times, when people said to me, ’You’re being pilloried,’ you could hear between the lines," he told me. "You could hear, ’I do this, too,’ or ’I have this problem, too.’ But what difference does that make? I have to talk to voters in their own vocabulary about it. That’s hard.

"I will say this," he said, saying this: "I have no desire to walk into a bar and pick up a woman. I love my wife.

"And maybe if the Internet didn’t exist?" he added. "Like, if I was running in 1955? I’d probably get elected mayor."

I started following Weiner around a few days after the bombshell of a fresh scandal. A 23-year-old legal researcher from southern Indiana named Sydney Leathers had revealed that Weiner had sexted her (using the nom de guerre "Carlos Danger") after his resignation from Congress in 2011. People in every corner of politics and pop culture were salivating. David Letterman was lampooning Weiner with a running gag (complete with cheesy graphics) called "Carlos Danger: Gaucho of Love." Over on Face the Nation, a baffled Bob Schieffer was calling him "flasher." Reporters from around the globe came to see the American Sexter—from Germany, Britain, Malaysia, you name it. I’d hang back and listen to them gossip.

"Did you see that woman lookin’ at him?" one guy would say.

"Maybe he’ll e-mail her," came the snickering reply. It was all very professional out there.

I walked about nine feet behind Weiner for more events than I can count, right up through the "victory party" on the night of the primary, when the Candidate’s number of votes had pushed against the floor, at less than 5 percent. His long, long trail was surreal even by American campaign standards. In his favorite metaphor—and he would mention this many times—he recalled being at a subway stop, early on, greeting voters. On this dreamlike day, he had been surrounded by cameras. "They were in a semicircle," he told me. "Or even I think it might have been a full circle. Cameras from everywhere. And what made it such a powerful image is that voters were trying to squeeze through the media to talk to me. They were pushing past the Malaysian cameraman just to shake my hand and tell me what was concerning them."

It had all started out with such promise. Weiner and his wife, a charismatic senior aide to Hillary Clinton named Huma Abedin, had planned his re-entry into politics to a T. They’d consented to a high-profile cover story for The New York Times Magazine—a media flourish that, Abedin believed, would be the perfect rollout, as it would be the final word on the whole horrid sexting mess, putting it behind them forever. And then they would be on to an issue-driven run, the kind that drew on Weiner’s tireless campaigning skills.

But then came the noise of these new allegations. He became the Entertainment, a political birthday clown, and when the press had walked away one too many times without a story about a heckler or a moment where Weiner had momentarily lost his cool, they let him vanish completely. His scrum of reporters dwindled down to nearly nothing. It was not uncommon for the press to be outnumbered by campaign workers. More than once, not counting the videographer Weiner had engaged to document the campaign for future, indeterminate use, I was the only journalist there.

The realities of the campaign didn’t always match the caricature that so enthralled the tabloids. Such as this incongruous fact: Weiner was a deeply likable man. The press treated him as though he’d always been a loathsome miscreant who’d apparently found an unlocked window and snuck into the government. No one rises up through the City Council, then through twelve years in the House, purely by being a relentless prick. Yet he was so easy to cast as one. He had the look of an aggressor. The front of his skull sometimes seemed as though it wanted to shove straight through the tight skin of his face. Any elegance he did possess was undercut by the fact that he looked like a freeze-dried Bobby Kennedy.

What really pained Weiner was the coverage—not that it made sport of him; that was his doing. He just wanted some attention to his actual policy proposals. "I thought there’d be some safe harbor for the issues," he said to me. "Safe harbor for someone who wanted to write, ’You know what? He’s got five ideas. He’s an idiot, but he’s got these five ideas.’ "

He did not have five ideas. He had 125. Set out in two fairly substantive books, his so-called "Keys to the City" ranged from the high-profile issues of the day—single-payer health care, for instance—to things like Idea Number 42, a call to digitize the city budget.

While more successful candidates were sticking to bland platitudes ("I’ll be back here in Far Rockaway all the time once elected mayor!"), Weiner had a microtechnician’s grasp of how the city actually works. At one event in the farthest reaches of Queens, quite off the cuff, he asked if they still hadn’t installed the comfort station at that corner of Little Bay Park; he was remembering a debate about a restroom, from 2005.

And yet in many simple things about his own life, Weiner seemed not really to remember a lot. I once asked if there was some politician he revered as a kid; he couldn’t think of one—and only recently was he reminded that he’d been in student government in high school. Which he recalled "only vaguely." It even turned out that, truth be told, Weiner did not even recollect the names of all the women he sexted.

"Maybe I don’t have the greatest connection with the emotional shit going on," he’d tell me, "but when it comes to looking at a problem in the city and how to fix it, that’s where I’m at my best. That’s where I’m good."

Good Anthony’s memory scored political points everywhere he went, but Bad Anthony was never far behind. And that man, Bad Anthony, campaigned with his whole body: sawing the air with flat hands to batter his message across to the big crowds, tilting his head just an inch to telegraph his doubt in the other candidates, nimbly spinning halfway around to blow an infuriating kiss to his hecklers. Day after day, everywhere he went, Weiner’s body language wouldn’t shut the hell up.

That was the accidental genius of it, how the two Anthonys really teamed up to become a force. The physicality of these performances was almost sexual. More than any other candidate I’ve ever seen in the wild, Weiner was exposed out there. Without a keyboard in sight, he was sexting the crowd like crazy.

The range and subtlety of Weiner’s gestures seemed to have no limits; there was never a wasted movement and certainly never a lazy one. He always seemed to be standing arms akimbo, jacketless, his shirtsleeves rolled up: I am a man who gets things done. He was so constantly akimbo that I believed this was a sign of his Darwinian existence as a born campaigner, trapped in what had always been what he called a "runty" body. In the political jungle, like the great horned owl or the mighty puffer fish, he was presenting a larger surface than his ever-shrinking 147-pound body, to intimidate predators and prey. He wanted to be big.

Politics was his natural habitat, and he indulged in every last bit of it. "For me," he would later say, "knocking on doors and running seventeen flights of stairs is absolutely natural. I’m a pretty highly evolved campaigning species."

One night early on, before his poll numbers had tanked, Weiner was in the middle of a body-language tour de force while talking to some kids in a park in the Bronx. Because his face was familiar, he was mobbed by people who wanted photos with him. Kids always wanted pics; fame was still the only promiscuity they understood. But adults wanted to pose, too. It should be noted that young women, for some reason, were keen for the keepsake, and they knew exactly who he was. Smiling for two cameras, Weiner was singing along with the blaring music. At the bridge of the song, synced with the band’s percussion, he made a rhythmic bup-bup-bup-bup noise. He was in good spirits back then.

Then he walked away, alone for a moment, strolling like the Kennedys did when they wanted to look all pensive during a crisis. I thought I was my usual distance away when suddenly his arm was around me. Not just a hand on my shoulder; his whole arm was around my neck, in the way that your oldest friend would walk with you. "I put the bup-bup-bup in there," he said affably, as though he was picking up some conversation we’d left off earlier, "because they used to fire guns in the air at that part of the music! So now it’s better just to make the sound."

As we strolled, the abnormality of this contact never really set in. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Weiner quite literally had a political gift for that, for the common touch. In a race, Weiner said, "people look at your bio or where you’re from or even how you look—and they want that level of a quasi-connection. Letting people know that you’ll fight for stuff they can’t fight for. So either they want someone perfect or someone who has the best ideas."

Without claiming the faintest talent for psychiatry, I kept coming back to the idea that sexting with people he’d never met was inextricable from campaigning. Because isn’t that a fairly spot-on description of sexting? Having a set of "quasi-connections"? Chasing the seductive shadows of false intimacy—not with one but with millions, both in the electorate and on the Internet? The Anthonys derived a lot of pleasure out of their respective habits. This was simply what they did. The main thing that divided Weiner up was unplanned and certainly unintended: Good Anthony had his fun in sunlight, wisecracking and singing on the trail. Bad Anthony had taken his pleasures alone and mainly by night.

You’ve probably seen some of Weiner’s sexts. They usually went a little like this. But I’ll clean up the language:

Carlos: "May I tell you what I pondered yesternight?"

Sydney: "That would please me so very much."

Carlos: "Still caressing your flowing locks, I see your cherished bosom heaving as you move to and fro. I reveal my eager manhood. But—what would you have me do?"

Sydney: "Ravage me."

All right, so I cleaned that up a lot. Except for that last phrase. Leathers actually wrote that line.

The portrait Sydney Leathers offered of Weiner had started out somewhat flattering; she said that had the two ever hooked up, the sex would have been very good. But soon realizing that the press was hungry for something less Weiner-friendly, she gradually adjusted her opinion. The Candidate, she told me, was obsessive almost to the point of physical improbability. "He needed constant attention," she said. "He’d get pissy if I didn’t do exactly what he wanted. He was a big baby."

Far from being mortified by the sudden media attention, Leathers leaned into it, a flower turning toward the sun. "I’m basically a nerd," she told me, recalling those long-ago days in legal research, before her job was to do other things. "Now, people expect me to be embarrassed. But I think it’s funny more than anything. I never did meet him in person. I’ve never seen Baby Carlos in real life. Though I guess I shouldn’t call it ’Baby Carlos.’ Too mean."

She quickly accepted an offer from the porn enterprise Vivid to star in an awkward soft-core clip for its website, then filmed a full-out porn flick for them with a Weiner look-alike. In this moment, she is still recognizable enough to get unwanted attention, if such a thing exists for her, in airports and on the street. "I mean, what the fuck!" she explained. "Why do I get ’bitch face’ in airports? It’s always from middle-aged women. I’m the Thomas Edison of sexting, and they hate it. They think I’m out to steal their husbands!"

I can vaguely understand those who are repulsed or simply mystified by sexting. It seems somewhat new—like drug use in sports, or kale. I remember receiving the most graphic pictures imaginable via e-mail in the late 1990s, and, sitting alone in a tiny room, it was as though the girl had appeared there by crazy magic. I heard her voice on the phone and stared at her alluring form. (No, thank you, Defense Department people who developed the Internet!)

This experience scarcely left me hobbled by guilt. In the years since, with long gaps, I’ve received a modest number of nude selfies from women and, to a far less extent, I’ve reciprocated. And I’m certainly not a rarity. The thing of it is: People who are in love send nude pics. I’ve received a few of those, and, yes, it was romantic, and, yes, it was sweet. People separated by long distances do it. People in lust, too. And a lot of people, like Weiner, do it without a whole lot of emotional investment. They like and want the anonymity. If the girl at the other end of the conversation can be anybody, you can be anybody.

But is any of this technically new and thus objectionable? Is it a practice to be shunned? Since the Dawn of Man, always doing the best we could with the current technology, we’ve been engaging in only slight variations on this sort of sexuality without interruption and (unless you allow it to break the heart of your beautiful wife, who also happens to be carrying your son) it’s been an awful lot of fun.

Look at the evidence. Were the earliest love letters in human history, for example, G-rated? Aren’t there—and I’m honestly asking—a few engorged schlongs in those breathtaking cave paintings of Lascaux? The same goes for telephones: Does anyone truly believe that phone sex started up only in the past twenty years? I’d bet that Alexander Graham Bell’s second phone call, after the famous "Watson, come here; I want to see you!" consisted of the phrase, "Beatrice, I want to see you, too!" When did we become so fucking shy?

For the record, I have observed the unspoken laws of the High-Minded Sexter. I have never delusionally cheated on anyone by sexting, and I have always deleted pictures if so requested. Still, it bears admitting that there are photos of my as-far-as-you-know-impressive junk zooming around out there in the world. In the Mutually Assured Destruction realm of sexting, which is as tense and precarious as anything that happened during the Cold War, I have a well-stocked arsenal of my own, and I am prepared to tap in those nuclear codes. This is where Weiner, who had enthusiastically sent selfies, let it all go wrong: Mutually Assured Destruction doesn’t work if one side has everything to lose and the other has everything to gain.

Weiner’s sexting technique was so slipshod, so fraught with rookie mistakes and poker-style tells, that one cannot help but wonder: At some level, did he sabotage himself? Did his narcissism run so deep that he needed to be judged by the entire world? All the trappings—accidentally tweeting an erect selfie, including his face in the pics—suggested a real possibility that maybe Bad Anthony had rebelled, that he had subverted Weiner’s quest to attain the one job he had ever truly wanted.

Only a fool would ask a man to explain his subconscious (by definition, all that stuff is, you know, sub a person’s consciousness), but I did so, in the waning hours of the campaign. Self-sabotage isn’t the rudest accusation you can level at someone.

"I’ve heard that," Weiner replied, nodding slowly. "Thought about it quite a bit. No doubt the obstacles in my way were obstacles I created. But I don’t think so. I just didn’t think of it all as a capital offense. And I rationalized it. I thought, ’This person’s my friend. Why would they turn on me?’ But it isn’t about harm I’ve done to the world—it’s about harm I’ve done to my wife. So rationalizing it is asinine."

The intoxication of sexting makes all of that easier to believe. No one marks their daybook with "5 P.M. Send cock pic to Jennifer." You do it purely in the moment, in the absolute belief that time will never pass. The fact that you’re sending a picture taken right now matters. You are connecting with someone, somewhere, broadcasting live. You’re in a half-dimension. There will never be consequences to what you are doing right at this moment.

The Weiner "victory party" was held in a place called Connolly’s Pub on East 47th Street in Manhattan. As I walked up—and how could I have been surprised?—who should be holding a presser out front but Sydney Leathers, latterly known as Anonymous and, after some rather hasty plastic surgery, owner of a brand-new Jayne Mansfield-volume pair of breasts, which were on proud partial display. She seemed really happy to be there and in front of the cameras. Someone asked her why she was there, and she said she didn’t really know but that she wanted to tell Weiner to stay out of the public eye.

She was really digging the attention. That sexty little legal researcher from Indiana had taken her shot, won the lottery, and made it: Today, she was a porn star.

Leathers, likely guided by her handlers from Vivid, was aggressive and cagey in her pursuit of her former friend, who actually sprinted through a McDonald’s next door to gain entrance to his own party.

Though the bar was packed, the campaign had set aside a tiny press area, which consisted merely of a few ridiculously high bar chairs. I’d been there for ninety minutes when an older lady strolled in and sat next to me, also perching herself ludicrously high off the ground. We had a few happy words up there, and she grinned. And suddenly I was staring at Weiner’s crocodile smile. There was no mistaking it. This was Anthony Weiner’s mother. I’d heard about her every day: how she’d been a schoolteacher for thirty-one years, and a few other little things.

Fran Weiner seemed a little dazed by the hubbub, but she was happy to tell me about Anthony as a boy. "He was always eager to please," she said. "And charming, very engaged with people."

This was making all kinds of sense, so I asked Mrs. Weiner what sports he’d liked as a kid. She said he liked hockey, but then added something curious: "But he wasn’t obsessive about it."

This had been a theme throughout my contact with Weiner. He always went out of his way—about sexting, about the New York Jets, about coffee, about everything—to assure me that he was not obsessive about any of it. He was focused on containing any suggestion that he lacked self-control. Somehow, his mother had picked up that habit, too.

I could have listened to Mrs. Weiner’s tales all night. She was the foremost living historian of both the Anthonys, Bad and Good, every lifelong flair and flaw, and everything she said seemed to resonate.

"Anthony was sleeping through the night at five weeks," Mrs. Weiner was saying proudly. "And he woke up with a smile. Literally! He woke up with a smile."

Weiner finally entered to just the right tone of mournful celebration and delivered his brief speech. He was "an imperfect messenger," but he’d been willing to fight, and he would sleep well knowing that, for all the circus of it, his campaign had had the best ideas. In the speech, Huma was not heard of—but then, that had been vintage Weiner for the whole campaign. He just didn’t want that to be tomorrow’s headline. Not that it was ever his choice to make.

Then, ever so aptly, as he left the pub and tried to thread his way through reporters to his SUV, there was commotion. And the final media image of the campaign was that of Anthony Weiner, seen through a flash-speckled car window, with a strangely disconnected expression on his face, raising his middle finger.

Exactly one week to the hour after his concession speech, Weiner was stretched out on an off-white sofa in the Park Avenue South apartment where he, Huma, and their 20-month-old son, Jordan, live. His one-eyed Persian cat, Shaka, was lying near but not next to him. On a table behind him stared out an audience of old photos: among them, Huma’s late father, appearing to issue a stern judgment, and the couple’s wedding day, which in tonight’s context looked like an elegantly posed question.

Leaning his head back like a fugitive who’d been run to ground at last, Weiner as usual had rolled up his sleeves on a button-down shirt, but this one was rumpled. He kept resting one or both stocking feet up on the coffee table. He looked drained, but five years younger than he had a week ago. He kept finishing sentences with "Whatever."

All the body language had gone out of him. His hands mostly stayed folded in his lap and, even in gestures, kept close to his body. Visually, he had gone quiet.

Things were getting back to normal. It had only been a week—and the end of a campaign feels like driving a car into a wall—but he was again able to take Jordan on little morning walks and make him breakfast. "He always used to yell ’Da-da-da’ from bed," Weiner said, "but the campaign interceded, and then it was ’Mama’ in the morning. And I thought, ’Fuck. I lost my one little thing I had.’ But now he’s back to calling Daddy in the morning, so that’s good."

At 49, Weiner is barely middle-aged, so he has another lifetime ahead of him. Who knew what would come next in this man’s career? He couldn’t see running for office again: not for mayor, certainly not for Congress.

"Congress just isn’t a good job anymore," he’d told me before the primary. "I was… I was okay at it. But why? Because I was a good talker about stuff, a good arguer about stuff. Not to overstate, but I was a pretty important member of Congress because I’d figured out the outside game pretty well. But if someone goes to Congress for thirty or forty years nowadays? They’re doin’ shit. They’re doin’ nothin’."

So maybe he’d do some consulting—but not political consulting, thank you. He’d met some excellent nonprofit people during the campaign. Perhaps he’d work with them. Or do some TV, potentially. "I’m okay with not living in fear of a Google Alert about some crazy thing coming up, or some woman showing up at my house."

Whatever: It was impossible to sweep aside the squalid, rather Grand Guignol spectacle of last week’s "victory party." Weiner again was blaming himself for it—for not handling it.

"I feel bad saying this," he said calmly, "but I was really fried that night. It was such a taut moment, and the campaign was coming to an end, and I had tried not to lose my composure in what might be the last political speech of my life. My family was there. Huma’s been kind of traumatized by this whole thing. So I was just completely frayed at the edges. But I knew immediately it was a mistake.

"Here’s another thing about it," he added, compelled to argue against his own point. "I had just given the press seven minutes of content, where I said what I wanted to say. I’m not gonna answer if they want to talk about some broad who’s standing on the street. It’s weird: When you’re in this, everyone is trying to be the viral moment. I was trying not to be."

In the space of a few sentences, he had just presented both sides of the incident at the party. He would continue debating himself like this for the next hour and was fairly convincing on both sides of everything.

At the end of every regret, there was always Huma. Oh, he showed contrition to the voters, but that was weak beer. He apologized to Huma and expressed his pain for her so frequently that there were times when I wondered whether he’d partly been trying to talk to her through the press. His honesty was challenged by all quarters, but his love for her seemed absolute. It was the core of him, the one thing he said—despite the lies—about which I never felt a trace of doubt.

I asked, had to ask, if they’d be staying together. "One thing I’m grateful for is that now I’m under no obligation to answer anything like this," he said. "But we’ve had a very rough time. It causes me a great deal of pain in the way she gets reported and the way she gets discussed. Her treatment in the press has been rough. It pains me because I deserve it. She doesn’t.

"I duck it as best I can," he added, "but her reputation has become the Woman Who Married an Idiot and Stuck with Him. More of it rolls off my back, because that’s the way I am constitutionally. She’s more sensitive. I’m just an empty, soulless vessel, so it doesn’t hurt me as much."

Weiner delivered that last remark with an utter lack of humor. At least, none was to be had from his face or voice, and his hands sure weren’t talking tonight.

But he hadn’t answered my question, so I needed to put it more bluntly: Now that the primary was over, would he and Huma be splitting up? Actually, I laughed at the absurdity of my own premise: Why would a political primary determine such a drastic personal decision—and with a kid in the mix?

Weiner laughed at the premise, too. "She’d stay with me if I broke twenty points!" he joked. "And actually if I made the runoff, she’d recommit the vows, in a Hawaii vacation. If I won she’d have a second child with me! I don’t know what people think."

But the sheer stillness of him was unnerving. The campaign—for the moment—had hollowed him out. Everything he did seemed to exude ambivalence. He was devastated, but he was fine. Whatever. He was a lounging, breathing combination of defiance and remorse—and the remorse was always, always about Huma. The defiance: That was all his.

At long last, unencumbered by the campaign or the long-observed traditions of same, he finally seemed to think about sexting and scandal in a relad way, and it flowed out of him. Both sides of the issue did.

"You ask about the higher meaning of sexting, but it was remarkably meaningless," he said, blinking incredulously. "It was almost like a video game you played. One that didn’t have much connection to reality."

Right on cue, Weiner’s remorse entered the picture. "But this weird synapse in my mind fired in a different direction," he said, "and I realized, ’Wait a minute. It’s not very significant to me. But it’s significant to Huma. It doesn’t really matter what I think about it. It kinda matters, the impact it’s having on her.’ And that switch going off made the game no longer interesting. It wasn’t like playing Madden! It wasn’t like playing an online role-playing game."

"Oh, great," I offered, trying to cheer him in the dumbest way. "Now people are gonna say, ’He does online role-playing!’"

Weiner laughed darkly. "Great. Get into that group."

But he wasn’t going to let an apology emerge without some qualification, some tinkering. The Ping-Pong match he was playing against himself wasn’t over. "To reduce what I did ad absurdum," he said, "I was sitting at a computer terminal going like this."

Here, he mimed typing on an invisible keyboard. But why would he apologize, to anyone, for that? What he deliberately didn’t include was what he was "typing" and to whom and what it meant. Surely there was more than tapping that led to this season in hell. I also noted the one glaring flaw in his impression: that Weiner’s "crime" hadn’t really always involved typing with both hands.

"Clicky clicky clicky—send!" he said, still sexting away in the air. "Clicky clicky send. The intellectual part of my brain was saying, ’Why is this so bad?’"

He had known the answer to this question each time he asked it, and the answer was Huma. Still, he kept asking it, and it sounded like he meant it.

"So?" I asked. "If you could go back, would you do it all again? Would you run?"

"If I could go back?" he asked, letting the phrase roll around in his mind a little. "If you tell me I’m gonna get 5 percent, you tell me how I’d answer that question. The process I went through to decide to run was the right one; the way I talked about sexting was…not right."

Weiner had stopped moving his feet on and off the table. His arms had been static for so long that they now seemed vestigial. "But if you could go back and do those things differently," he asked, "would it get you to a different place? I don’t know. So I’m not making myself crazy over it."

It was getting late. Huma would be back from her work dinner soon, and nobody had anything to gain from putting us together in the same room.

Anthony Weiner padded his way in front of me to the door. I told him he’d be back. Not to be polite or fill a gap; it’s the way he’s built. He pondered the remark briefly, then shrugged. But, for once, it was hard to read him. He might have meant: No, it’s too late for all that. He might have meant: Of course I will.

But a heavy silence had settled over the apartment. Shaka the cat had found some comfier place to rest her one eye. Jordan, who’d been coughing in his room off and on during the evening, was deep asleep. Weiner and I shook hands and then he was alone.

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